PowerProtect Data Manager: Declarative Data Extracts and Reporting

One theme that has has been prevalent in some customer conversations is that they may not have the skillset internally to accommodate their reporting needs. Whether that is querying the PowerProtect REST API via a 3rd party BI tool such as Splunk, Grafana, Microsoft BI, Qlik, Tableau or perhaps writing the reports in something like PowerShell, or Python.

That really got me thinking... if some of the tools I use for automation are declarative in nature like Ansible... specifically the playbooks. Why can't we use this same methodology for creating data extracts and reports from PowerProtect Data Manager?

The answer is you absolutely can!

I began researching declarative report builders out there to get some ideas and while there are a few... there doesn't appear to be many appealing options.

So I thought to myself... I should write one to close out 2024 with a bang! I mean how hard could this be right?... lol.

The answer is it was pretty challenging BUT... the results are pretty cool, or at least I think so.

The code, and documentation can be found here:

https://github.com/SkunkworksAutomation/power-protect-ezdata

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think! It can take report writing from hours down to minutes.

Below is a quick primer on filtering if you need it:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/powerprotect-data-manager-rest-api-working-filters-cliff-rodriguez

Any with that I wish you and yours a happy holiday season!